The Leaf Cutter Ant Natural History
Size
Workers are between 3-16mm, soldiers are 23mm and queens are 30mm.
Habitat and Distribution
Forests and grasslands in Central and South America.
Diet
They eat a special fungus which they cultivate using leaves that they cut. They can form lines of up to 30 meters in length as they carry their leaf cuttings back to the nest.
Age
The queen can live for up to 10 years.
Groups and Breeding
A female breeds once before starting her own colony. A single colony can have as many as 5 million individuals at any one time, all produced by a single queen who can lay up to 30,000 eggs a day.
Threats
With such large colony sizes they can be very destructive and as such are persecuted by farmers, but are also collected for the pet trade. There are people who however make a living by combining the two. When they become a nuisance on a farm, people will dig up the problem nests and relocate the into the pet trade.
Interesting Facts
They get their name from the sharp jaws which they use to cut leaves into pieces. It is these pieces that they carry back to their nests to decay and allow the fungus to grow. This fungus can be found nowhere else but in their colonies.
The Leaf Cutter Ant During Your Day Out in Kent
At Wingham Wildlife Park these ants can be seen moving between three tanks in the Bug Gardens. The Bug Gardens are also home to a variety of tarantulas, cockroaches, beetles and other invertebrates.
The more you know…
Want to know more about this animal? Check out our keeper blogs about them here.